Andrew Erlandson

As a graduate student in the field of nineteenth-century American literature, Andrew studies the intellectual history of competition. His research explores how fields such as economics, evolutionary biology, or eugenics proliferated the concept of competition as a means towards economic success, biological complexity, or virtue, and how these ideologies have been received outside of those fields. Through the study of literature, periodicals, or other textual artifacts, he hopes to better understand how competition has been understood and how this understanding has shaped or distorted the relationship between the individual and the self, society, and the material or natural world.

Andrew's research interests include democracy theory, histories of capitalism, print culture, U.S. antebellum reform movements, African American literature, multi-ethnic literature, disability studies, posthumanism, and affect theory.